The Onion, that venerable source of satire both topical and historic, is today dipping its toes in the premium content pond. The result: "Future: News from the Year 2137," an Onion-ized look at the world of tomorrow today.

Click to viewAccording to highly regarded news scoopers at The Onion, a new Google service promises …
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The latest Onion News Network short, which is currently available on iTunes, differs in two key ways from typical Onion content: it runs about twelve minutes instead of two or three, and costs two bucks instead of, well, zero.

The video itself is frenetic fun—the Israel-Palestine clip above gives a good sense of the general vibe, and is probably the most successful section in the piece—but the entire project tests a couple of waters at once. Getting people to pay for content online is almost as hard as can hooking those addled attention spans for more than a few minutes at once. "Future News" wants very much to do both.

If anyone's got the track record to pull it off, it's The Onion, whose move to amp up ONN video content over the last few years has been a seamless success. And Future News—which took two years to bring to life—has every chance of achieving the same. [Future News]